San Diego

(JTA) -- The United States has dropped deportation proceedings against the son of a Hamas founder who served as a spy for Israel's Shin Bet security service.

Mosab Hassan Yousef will be granted asylum in the United States following a routine background check, an immigration judge ruled Wednesday during a deportation hearing in San Diego, Calif. A U.S. Department of Homeland Security attorney said during the short hearing that the government was dropping its objections to the asylum request.

Yousef, 32, a convert to Christianity, has lived in the United States since 2007.

With lessons in marketing strategies and discussions about Israel, BBYO’s Manhattan summer internship program combines career skills and Judaism.

08/26/2008 - 20:00

Amy Spiro

Editorial Intern

They could have been sitting by the pool or shopping at the mall, but 67 high school students from across the country were in Midtown on a sweltering late-July day working on business plans for mock restaurants and Laundromat businesses they were trying to get off the ground.
Like contestants on “The Apprentice,” they were trying to impress a discerning panel of judges, this one from a Baruch College entrepreneurial center addressing considerations like target demographics, marketing strategies and expenses such as salaries, insurance, utilities and upkeep.

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) -- The University of California Board of Regents addressed the recent spate of hate violence and racist vandalism at its campuses by announcing a series of measures designed to monitor and prevent hate violence in the university system.

Adolescence is a miserably difficult time. That’s about the time that Nicole Opper decided that she was going to be Jewish. That’s about the time that Avery Klein-Cloud, the subject of Opper’s first feature-length film, “Off and Running,” began to struggle with questions of her own identity, questions not unlike those the filmmaker had wrestled with a decade or so before, only much more complicated.

For the filmmaker and the subject of ‘Off and Running,’
adolescence means self-evaluation.

01/27/2010 - 19:00

George Robinson

Special To The Jewish Week

Adolescence is a miserably difficult time. That’s about the time that Nicole Opper decided that she was going to be Jewish. That’s about the time that Avery Klein-Cloud, the subject of Opper’s first feature-length film, “Off and Running,” began to struggle with questions of her own identity, questions not unlike those the filmmaker had wrestled with a decade or so before, only much more complicated.

Houston — In a schoolroom of Congregation Emanu-El, a Reform rabbi is leading a seminar on patrilineal descent. Down the hall, a discussion on Jewish mysticism is taking place under the direction of a Conservative rabbi. A few doors away, an Orthodox rabbi is talking about Ahavat Yisrael, love of one’s fellow Jew.
Elsewhere in the synagogue, the largest Reform temple in the Houston area, two dozen other classes and meditation sessions and song-composing workshops are taking place at the same time, led by a cross-section of rabbis and teachers and political leaders.

With some 53,000 residents in the state’s rural north-central flatlands, Monroe, La., is not the kind of town that would normally expect to play host to the mayor of Jerusalem. But in October 2002, Ehud Olmert came to the county seat of Ouachita Parish to urge 500 to 1,000 Evangelical Christians to give, and give generously, to support victims of terrorism in the Holy City he then governed.

Houston — In a schoolroom of Congregation Emanu-El, a Reform rabbi is leading a seminar on patrilineal descent. Down the hall, a discussion on Jewish mysticism is taking place under the direction of a Conservative rabbi. A few doors away, an Orthodox rabbi is talking about Ahavat Yisrael, love of one’s fellow Jew.

Koby Mandell would have turned 21 last week, and probably would be finishing his service in the Israeli army.

Instead, slain at 13, with a friend, in a cave near their home in the community of Tekoa on Lag B’Omer, 2001, Koby is a memory to those who loved him and a symbol of the hundreds of innocent Jewish victims of the intifada, an eighth grader stoned to death on a day he skipped school.